A History of Japanese Americans in California:DISCRIMINATORY PRACTICES

As with most people of color, Japanese Americans have suffered a
variety of discriminatory practices, legislation, and restrictions.
Perhaps this could have been expected considering the initial conditions
under which Japanese were originally enticed to immigrate to the United
States  as only a source of labor, with no plans for them to stay and
participate actively in the life of the society.

Even as a source of labor, Japanese immigrants were criticized for
being too numerous. They were seen as unassimilable and potentially
capable of overrunning the state. The Asiatic Exclusion League, formed
in May 1905, mounted a campaign to exclude Japanese and Koreans from the
United States. Under pressure from the league, the San Francisco Board
of Education ruled on October 11, 1906 that all Japanese and Korean
students should join the Chinese at the segregated Oriental School that
had been established in 1884. There were 93 Japanese students in the 23
San Francisco public schools at that time. Twenty-five of those students
had been born in the United States.

To appease those Californians who were agitating for cessation of
Japanese immigration without offending the Japanese government,
President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the 1907-08 Gentlemen's
Agreement, whereby the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports
to laborers immigrating to the United States. However, parents, wives,
and children of laborers already in the United States could immigrate,
as well as laborers who had already been here.

This agreement nevertheless stimulated the anti-Japanese movement.
Rather than cutting off all immigration from Japan, the agreement
resulted in a steady stream of Japanese women entering California. Soon
thereafter, children were born, resulting in increases in the Japanese
population, rather than decreases. Arranged marriage, sometimes with the
exchange of photographs, was the accepted mode of contracting marriages
in Japanese society. This practice allowed male issei immigrants to
marry, and to send for their brides to join them in this country. The
effect was to bolster the stereotyped image of Japanese as being sneaky
and untrustworthy, even though the provisions of the Gentlemen's
Agreement were being scrupulously maintained.

As the Japanese American population steadily increased, through
immigration of picture brides and the birth of nisei children,
anti-Japanese forces regrouped after World War I. Charges were made that
the Japanese birth rate was three times as high as the general
population's. The fact that Japanese females in prime child-bearing
years were compared with White women from 15 to 45 years of age was not
mentioned. The unassimilability of Japanese was charged. As part of the
Immigration Act of 1924, immigration from Japan was completely cut off
for 28 years.

Beginning in January 1909 and continuing until after World War II,
anti-Japanese bills were introduced into the California legislature
every year. The first to become law was the Webb-Hartley Law (known more
commonly as the Alien Land Law of 1913), which limited land leases by
"aliens ineligible to citizenship" to three years, and barred further
land purchases. Amendments to this law in 1919 and 1920 further
restricted land leasing agreements. Although the law contains no mention
of Asians by name, it is clear that "aliens ineligible to citizenship"
included, among others, Japanese, a group without access to U.S.
citizenship and the target of anti-Asian groups during this period.

The issue of U.S. citizenship eventually was decided by the 1922
Supreme Court decision of Takao Ozawa v. United States,
which declared that Japanese were ineligible for U.S. citizenship. "Free
white persons" were made eligible for U.S. citizenship by Congress in
1790. "Aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent" were
similarly designated by Congress in 1870. Due to some ambiguity about
the term "white," some 420 Japanese had been naturalized by 1910, but a
ruling by a U.S. attorney general to stop issuing naturalization papers
to Japanese ended the practice in 1906. Ozawa had filed his
naturalization papers in 1914. In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court judged
that since Ozawa was neither a "free white person" nor an African by
birth or descent, he did not have the right of naturalization as a
Mongolian.

Influenced by the anti-Japanese movement, an amendment to the State
Political Code in 1921 allowed establishment of separate schools for
children of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian parentage. These
children were not to be integrated into other public schools once
separate schools were established. School districts in Sacramento County
elected to maintain separate schools in the communities of Florin,
Walnut Grove, Isleton, and Courtland. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino
children in these school districts attended segregated schools until
World War II. In 1945, a Japanese American family challenged the
constitutionality of segregated schools, and the Los Angeles County
Superior Court concurred that segregation on the basis of race or
ancestry violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The California legislature
repealed the 1921 provision in 1947.

The most widely perpetrated discriminatory action toward West Coast
Japanese Americans was the internment camp policy of World War II, which
was set into motion by the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. The executive order did not mention Japanese
Americans by name, but the designation of military areas and the
decision to exclude certain persons from these areas was directed toward
Japanese Americans. Thirteen temporary detention camps in California
were hastily established to hold Japanese Americans until more permanent
camps in remote sections of the country could be constructed.

After Executive Order 9066 was issued, the vast majority of public
proclamations emanating from Lt. General John DeWitt, Commander of the
Western Defense Command, were directed toward controlling the movement
and freedom of Japanese Americans. Similarly, the civilian exclusion
orders, issued by DeWitt, directed Japanese Americans along the West
Coast to report for detention at designated times and places.

Incarceration policy was challenged by Gordon Hirabayashi, who
violated curfew regulations in the state of Washington; Fred Korematsu
of Oakland, who was prosecuted for knowingly remaining in an area
forbidden by military orders; Minoru Yasui, who was prosecuted for
violation of curfew orders as a test case; and Mitsuye Endo of
Sacramento, who claimed unlawful detention. None of the judgments that
resulted from these cases dealt directly with the constitutionality of
incarcerating more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. But Ex parte
Endo, issued December 16, 1944, did result in the rescinding of
exclusion orders, effective January 2, 1945, which eventually closed the
10 concentration camps in the United States.

During the internment years, several legislative actions affected
thousands of Japanese Americans. A California statute of 1943, amended
in 1945, prohibited "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from earning
their living as commercial fishermen in coastal waters. Torao Takahashi
brought suit, and after a tortuous sequence of events, including a U.S.
Supreme Court ruling that the statute was unconstitutional, resident
alien Japanese fishermen were again allowed to fish the waters off the
California coast in 1948.

In 1944, a federal statute amended the Nationality Act of 1940 to
permit U.S. citizens to renounce citizenship during wartime. The
Department of Justice intended that leaders of disturbances at the Tule
Lake Segregation Center renounce their citizenship, therefore making
themselves eligible for further detention when the camps were
dismantled. Instead, 5,522 renunciations came from Japanese Americans
(5,371 were from persons confined at Tule Lake), rather than the several
hundred expected from pro-Japan elements. When the concentration camps
were closed, many internees regretted renouncing their U.S. citizenship,
citing coercion, intimidation, and fears of hostility by the dominant
society. Lawsuits to revalidate citizenship continued until 1965,
including Abo v. Clark (77 F. Supp. 806), which returned
U.S. citizenship to 4,315 nisei.

During World War II, while Japanese and Japanese Americans were
unable to defend themselves in court, California's Attorney General was
allocated additional funds to prosecute violations of the Alien Land Law
of 1913. A total of 79 cases were prosecuted, including 59 after the
war. The first challenge to the Alien Land Law was Harada v.
State of California, in which the Superior Court of Riverside
County declared in 1918 that Jukichi Harada could purchase property in
the name of his children, who were U.S. citizens though still minors.
Subsequent court cases in other jurisdictions had differing results,
some ruling that minor children could not own property.

Two escheat cases had particular significance in invalidating the
Alien Land Law. The case of Oyama v. State of California
in 1948 determined that non-citizen parents could purchase land as gifts
for citizen children. The Fujii v. State of California
case in 1952 resulted in the Alien Land Law of 1913 being declared
unconstitutional. Legal obstacles to land purchases by Asians were thus
removed.

To provide partial restitution for losses and damages resulting from
the internment, an Evacuation Claims Act was passed by Congress. While
losses by Japanese Americans were conservatively estimated to be around
$400,000,000, only 10 percent of this amount was disbursed to former
internees. The issue remains alive today in 1981, with the establishment
of a Congressional Commission to investigate the historical, legal,
economical, and psychological impacts of the forced internment of over
120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Japanese Americans have also endured informal discriminatory
practices. Shopping, dining, and recreational activities at some
business establishments were denied to Japanese Americans in previous
years. Restrictive covenants in housing affected where they lived. When
deceased members of the highly decorated 442nd Combat team were returned
to the United States after World War II, some cemeteries refused to
allow them gravesites because of their ancestry. In the past, some
occupations have been closed to Japanese Americans, yet others such as
gardening have been considered particularly suitable for their
temperament, skills, and social standing in the society. Outward
manifestations of discriminatory practices toward Japanese Americans can
be subtle, but are still very much in existence as recent legal cases
involving discrimination in employment promotion indicate.